It was the last day of a week-long book sale in the basement of the Edinburgh University Library, and everything had been marked down to ten pence. Among the many volumes I crammed into a box and lugged to the purchase table was The Poetical Works of William Cowper, edited by Humphrey Milford. Cowper (1731–1800) was one of those authors about whom I thought I knew a lot; I’d grown up singing his hymn “Oh, for a Closer Walk with God” and knew he had suffered from depression and been friends with the great hymn-writer and preacher John Newton; and in graduate school I had memorized his poem “The Castaway” and knew he’d begun his great work, The Task, with a self-consciously ridiculous song to a sofa.

William Cowper was, I thought, one of those placeholders in the history of literature, rather like C. P. E. Bach in music: falling at the end of one “period” or at the beginning of another (one can’t be sure which), often dull, occasionally memorable, but interesting mainly by virtue of having influenced later, greater artists—in Cowper’s case, Coleridge and especially Words-worth. Indeed, although he was probably the most famous poet in England for at least two decades after the publication of The Taskin 1785, since then Cowper has remained a major minor poet or a minor major poet—either way, with emphasis on the minor. Randall